The present invention relates to document feeding, and, in particular, to an apparatus in which paper or other such documents with curled or dog-eared edge are fed one at a time onto a document supporting surface.
For increasing the throughput of mailing machines, it is important to provide means for buffering transport of inked documents exiting a liquid ink printer, such as an ink jet printer, so that the ink is relatively dry upon the document and will not smear. This presents a problem of storing the documents during the drying period without leading to stoppages in the operation of the transport and in turn halting operation of the entire mailing system. Heretofore, it has been the practice to extend the path of travel for documents to enable sufficient drying time prior to further manipulation of the document. Machines for drying articles, such as printed material, have often consisted of a long, substantially horizontal, conveyor belt on which articles to be dried are placed. A disadvantage of this type of machine is that, since they are longitudinally oriented, extending the path utilizes valuable space and consumes much time. U.S. Pat. No. 5,409,206 entitled APPARATUS FOR BUFFERING TRANSPORT OF DOCUMENT, assigned to the assignee of the instant patent application, describes a buffer apparatus for handling a continuous flow of freshly inked sheets at a high input rate. Although this arrangement worked satisfactorily, the present inventor found that the buffer apparatus experienced problems receiving bent, warped, or otherwise physically deformed inked documents. Generally, a document handler can only be reliably used if the documents are in relatively good condition and without folds or a large amount of curl. Consequently, feeding a document in the aforementioned system may result in misalignment, smeared ink, or a jam. For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a buffet apparatus which can feed a deformed document without stopping or diverting the moving document, and without requiring any operator intervention.